5 January 2022

The Industrialisation of Space

By Gwynne Dyer

It will be a bumper year for big space launches to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, including many manned flights, but the real shocker is the number of satellites and spaceships being launched by private companies. 

Never mind Elon Musk’s twelve-thousand-small-satellite Starlink programme, which is already becoming a traffic hazard after only 1,892 satellites have been launched, sixty at a time. (The Chinese have lodged a complaint.) There are 39 other companies in eleven different countries whose vehicles are scheduled to make their maiden flights this year.

There’s ‘Blue Whale 1’ from Perigee Aerospace in South Korea, ‘Agnibaan’ from AgniKul Cosmos in India, and ‘RFA One’ from Rocket Factory Augsburg in Germany. Not to mention ‘Hyperbola-2’ from i-Space in China, ‘Eris’ from Gilmour Space Technologies in Australia, and ‘Terran 1’from Relativity Space in the United States. 

It’s like 1910, when there were hundreds of start-up car manufacturers in the world. Space transport is becoming an industrial-scale operation now like road transport was then, and everybody with an alternative approach that might fly is piling in.

For example, ‘Blue Whale 1’ is a two-stage, two-tonne rocket that can put a 50-kg. satellite into a 500-km.-high Sun-synchronous orbit (useful for imaging, weather and spy satellites). Perigee plans to launch up to forty Blue Whale 1 rockets a year from an Australian site at $2 million each.

Agnibaan’s special feature is that its rocket engine is 3D-printed at the company’s site in Madras. (Everybody has a special feature.) It can deliver a 100-kg. payload to a 700 km. orbit, and the launches will be made from Alaska Aerospace Corp’s Kodiak Island facility since India still has limited space at its own commercial launch sites. And on, and on…

The heavy-lift rockets are proliferating too. Europe’s Ariane 6 vehicle test-flies from Kourou spaceport for the first time this year. It comes in two versions: the larger can carry 21 tonnes into low Earth orbit (LEO). Japan’s new H-3, which launches from Tanegashima this year, is about the same size but can deliver six tonnes into a lunar transfer orbit.

But the four really heavy lifters are all American, and all are attempting first flights this year. Blue Origin’ is designed to deliver 45 tonnes to LEO, but only the first stage is reusable. ‘Vulcan-Centaur’, mostly for military use, lifts 27 tonnes into LEO and 12 tonnes to a lunar transfer orbit. The upper stage is the latest iteration of a seven-decades-old design.

Space Launch System (SLS), descended from the rocket that carried the Space Shuttle into orbit, is NASA’s own new heavy lifter. It will ultimately be able to deliver 95 tonnes to LEO and 27 tonnes to a lunar transfer orbit, and is the space agency’s preferred vehicle to flights to the Moon and Mars, but once again we’re dealing with an ‘expendable’ rocket. An expensive way to travel.

The star of the show, without a doubt, is Elon Musk’s Starship, whose first flight is still tentatively scheduled for this month.

It may well crash and burn – most of his maiden flights do – but that’s the way he works, and he has planned at least a dozen more launches this year. If there are bugs in the newly celebrated marriage of the super-heavy launch vehicle and the passenger- and cargo-carrying Starship proper, he’ll weed them out in the end.

This is a real spaceship: room for a hundred people or a thousand cubic metres of cargo space. Both parts are reusable, and the Starship can refuel in orbit. It will land on the Moon, and eventually on Mars. It will be, as Musk said, “a generalized transport mechanism for the greater solar system.”

All of these advances will be overshadowed by the various space spectaculars coming up this year: the unfolding of the James Webb telescope, NASA’s ‘Artemis ‘ mission orbiting the Moon,  the joint Russian- European ExoMars mission, Indian, Russian, Japanese and South Korean soft landings on the Moon.

But the real news is that after marking time for fifty years, we are actually getting off the planet at last. Cargo to orbit is now affordable (if you’re rich or corporate), and both Earth orbit and the surface of the Moon will begin to accumulate a human population. A thousand people in fifteen years?

Mars will take a little longer, probably, but we’re on our way

 January 2022

Nuclear Power: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

By Gwynne Dyer

At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original seventeen) will shut down on 31 December of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live with the fear of a nuclear (power) holocaust.

What’s more, all the lost energy from the nuclear plants will be “compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies,” promised Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research. An elegant solution, but there is a catch.

Most of the wind and solar power that Germany is building will go to replace its nuclear power plants, not to eliminate the coal and gas that it is still burning in huge amounts to generate electricity. So Germany will go on burning coal until 2038 (France is out now, the UK by 2024), and it also imports big volumes of gas from Russia (at great geopolitical cost).

Fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide; nuclear power doesn’t. By shutting down nuclear power instead of coal and gas, Germany has dumped an extra 350 megatonnes (Mt) of CO₂ into the air in the past decade – plus maybe another 350 Mt yet to come before they have built enough wind and solar power to replace the fossil fuels they should have dumped first.

There’s also an estimated extra 1,100 Germans a year dying from breathing in the fossil fuel pollution in their country, but they’re dying in a good cause: all their nervous fellow-citizens will sleep better at night.

Just one day ahead of Germany, Belgium announced on 30 December that it will shut all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2025. It too promises to replace the lost electricity with power from renewable sources eventually, but it will just burn more coal and gas in the meantime.

How long is ‘meantime’? Nobody knows, but it’s clearly a price that Belgians are willing to pay. 

And when the European Commission proposed a new law last weekend that recognises nuclear power as ‘green’ (provided that the plants have strict plans for the disposal of nuclear waste), there was an outcry all across the European Union. German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke condemned the proposal as simply “wrong.”

This is the triumph of fear over common sense. To advocate abandoning nuclear power when the great threat is carbon dioxide emissions (and we are losing the race to decarbonise) is folly.

There are currently 441 commercial nuclear reactors in the world, supplying about 10% of the world’s electricity. There could have been three or four times as much nuclear power by now if the Green movement had not exploited a couple of accidents in the 1970s and 80s to cripple it.

There is reason to suspect that the original Green hostility to nuclear power was encouraged and subsidised by the US fossil fuel industry, which has always been quick to spot emerging potential rivals and sabotage them. But the hostility is self-sustaining now, fed by fantasy statistics and deliberate scare-mongering.

There have actually been just three major accidents in some sixty years of operation by hundreds of nuclear power plants, only one of which caused human casualties: Chernobyl in 1986, where 28 plant workers were killed and 15 other people subsequently died of thyroid cancer.

But nobody at all died at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 (although 20,000 died as a result of the magnitude 9.0 sub-sea quake and the tsunami that devastated the city). Many more people die from coal pollution each and every day than have died from nuclear power accidents in the entire past half-century.

Yet a vocal minority of Europeans are terrified of the technology, and they are so well organised that most European countries have banned nuclear power or are shutting it down now. (France and the UK are the great exceptions.) What can explain this strange behaviour on the continent that was once home to the Enlightenment?

I don’t know, but I once noticed that Europe’s anti-nuclear fervour plots nicely onto the witch-hunts of the 15^th to 18^th centuries. Of the 40,000 to 60,000 alleged witches hanged or burned, German-speaking Europe alone accounted for almost half, and it’s the heartland of anti-nuclear sentiment today.

Never mind. We can forgive the Europeans for their anti-nuclear foolishness, because in most other respects they lead the world in cutting emissions. And outside Europe, the only noteworthy countries that ban nuclear power are Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and the Philippines.

There are currently new 52 nuclear reactors under construction, most of them in Asia. A new generation of compact modular reactors that  can be assembled in factories and cannot melt down will be on the market in less than five years. The missing piece of the post-fossil-fuel puzzle has been found – and the Europeans can sleep in peace.